Collaborating madness

[craytab]

Seems like the trend now in the knife industry is collaborate, collaborate, collaborate! Take any said designer that most folks would never be able to afford, and have another manufacturer put it together and slap logos everywhere to make it legit.

md collabs really set it off, you have Terzuola and Ferrum Forge jumping through WE to make (meaning to me you don't own either a Terzuola or Ferrum knife, you own a WE knife still). I don't remember the last knife at Spyderco made by either Sal or Erik. Benchmade has been using Butch and Ball for all their flippers. Brous is making blades overseas now, copying himself. Emerson let Kershaw do their thing with cqc everything. Chaves and Pena going through Reate, I would love I mean fricking love a Chaves, but not a copied scaled down version. Protech is going through Boker. Strider made by Protech. Vox made by Ace. So many more, why keep going, I know it's nothing new, it just seems to be ridiculously accelerating.

So you have a designer, manufacturer, and producer all who are different now. I don't know, I kind liked it where everything was done in house, and not pieced out. I think it devalues the work that went into building a great name at the expense of everyone making that dough.

I can vaguely see what you are saying. I like a knife company to have a solid foundation and a clear direction. Part of this is being able to produce your own knife designs.

That said, the big successful knife companies you complain about having colabs have a clear direction and a solid foundation they developed all on their own. Take kershaw, spyderco, and BM as examples. I'd bet they sell more in house designs than colabs combined. BM rarely collaborates. Spyderco's long standing classic as well as their value lines are in house designs (they are by far the most selling). ZT is but a fraction of kershaw. Think about how many clamshell kershaws get sold a year in big box stores. Those are rarely colabs.

Further, if a company can bring a knife to market with quality materials and very good F&F/QC at a price I think worth the value in a design that appeals to me, why in the hell would I care if it is a collaboration? To me, the problem with collaborations is when that is all a company is capable of doing. Your company has no direction of its own. CRKT is an example of this. The do nothing but colabs. They have no factories of their own. They don't do anything but market a knife. Their QC/F&F is notoriously hit and miss. This does those great designers no justice. Doesn't matter if it is a great design colab if the quality isn't there, the materials are sub-par, and the price is above the competition.

As long as a company has a foundation and a direction with high a quality to value ratio, collaborations are never a bad thing IMO.